The Annals of Iowa

Review of: "American Organic: A Cultural History of Farming, Gardening, Shopping, and Eating," by Robin O’Sullivan

Dilly, Barbara J.

Book Reviews and Notices      279 
Reviewer Matthew J. Margis is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Iowa State Uni-
versity. He is working on a dissertation about the evolution of the National 
Guard during the Progressive Era. 
John H. Taber’s edited diary, A Rainbow Division Lieutenant in France, 
recounts his wartime experiences as a reserve officer attached to the 
168th Infantry Regiment (Iowa National Guard) of the 42nd Infantry 
Division, also known as the Rainbow Division. Stephen Taber edited 
and transcribed his second cousin’s wartime diary with few altera-
tions, although he updated some of the antiquated language to appeal 
to a modern audience. He also chose to eliminate the daily date entries, 
which creates some confusion, though it does little to hinder the diary’s 
flow. The editor did cross-reference the diary’s information to ensure 
factual accuracy. 
  Overall, this diary serves as an interesting firsthand account. As 
a primary source, the book provides valuable insights into the mindset 
and day-to-day activities of an officer in the French trenches during 
World War I. Although Taber was not an Iowan, he did serve with an 
Iowa National Guard regiment, so this account of his experiences will 
appeal to anyone interested in Iowa’s wartime history. In many ways, 
the book complements Hugh H. Thompson’s transcribed diary, Trench 
Knives and Mustard Gas: With the 42nd Rainbow Division in France, edited 
by Robert H. Ferrell (2004), which also recounts the experiences of an 
army officer attached to the 168th Regiment. However, because this is 
a diary, anyone seeking an analytical account of World War I or life in 
the trenches will need to look elsewhere. 
 
 
American Organic: A Cultural History of Farming, Gardening, Shopping, 
and Eating, by Robin O’Sullivan. CultureAmerica Series. Lawrence: 
University Press of Kansas, 2015. 382 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliog-
raphy, index. $34.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Barbara J. Dilly is associate professor of anthropology at Creighton 
University and an Iowa resident. Her research and writing focus on, among 
other things, rural communities and sustainability. 
Through a kaleidoscopic interdisciplinary lens, Robin O’Sullivan ex-
amines what is really on our plates when we decide to eat organic. 
Large, looming, complex, and interconnected issues are embedded in 
the individual question “what’s for dinner” in America. This historical 
analysis of the American organic movement provides a new critical 
paradigm to tackle the complexity of what is at stake within organic 
farming, gardening, shopping, and eating decisions in terms of health, 
food justice, and environmental sustainability. O’Sullivan examines 
280      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
how food is grown and why that matters to human and environmental 
health as well as the health of the rural economy. She questions how 
food is marketed and whether or not Americans actually have free 
choice or enough credible information to make healthy and morally 
responsible consumer choices.  
 Can consumers improve their health and enact social change by 
buying organic food? O’Sullivan argues that the history of the move-
ment does not show that consumer health is greatly improved or that 
mainstream food production practices have significantly changed as a 
result of consumer activism. Even though organic production can pro-
tect soil and water health, conserve energy, and promote sustainable 
communities, it cannot be shown that organic consumers have enough 
power to choose and control their food choices in the capitalist market-
place, let alone change the large structures that control the way food is 
produced in America. 
 The organic movement began on the periphery of American society 
and gained credibility with environmentalists and food consumers be-
cause it offered individual decision-making alternatives to conventional 
agriculture. The practical individual economic decision alternatives 
regarding what and how to grow and market food were, however, 
historically complicated by policy debates. O’Sullivan makes a major 
methodological contribution by drawing these issues into one rigorous 
study that examines subversive challenges to scientific knowledge and 
reveals conflicted social and moral philosophies. It is a mouthful, and 
it takes time to digest, but O’Sullivan’s impressive scholarship pro-
vides an academic gourmet menu for food studies, consumer studies, 
and environmental studies scholars as well as for the general public.  
 O’Sullivan reveals that organics are still part of larger unanswered 
questions centered on quests for a better life for the environment, for 
farmers, and for consumers. What started out as a moral alternative 
individual decision movement led by J. I. Rodale in 1947 took on 
broad reform and even revolutionary dimensions as it evolved. But 
those dimensions remained fragmented; the movement did not cen-
tralize leadership to transform agricultural production and marketing. 
In fact, the movement went mainstream only when the discourses on 
healthy eating were coopted by the capitalist market’s emphasis on 
consumer choice. Why has the movement not moved past individual 
decisions? What fragments it? O’Sullivan places the complexity of 
these questions within the context of the capitalist food production 
infrastructure, where she exposes the imbalances in power relations 
that shape individual decisions about what to eat and how to produce it.  
 The questions of what to eat need to be broadened, O’Sullivan 
argues, to include “what kind of agriculture can best reduce carbon 
Book Reviews and Notices      281 
emissions, increase biodiversity, improve human health and still ‘feed 
the world’” (6). While there are strong, culturally resilient ideas associ-
ated with respect for nature’s wholeness and simplicity, independence 
and freedom to engage in meaningful and sustainable relationships to 
land, abundant harvests and health, respect for honest hard work, and 
higher purposes in life (12), there are powerful capitalist infrastructure 
forces that enable concentrated economic, political, and cultural au-
thority to sustain the hegemony of conventional chemically based ag-
riculture.  
 O’Sullivan argues that while the organic movement convinced 
many people that they can formulate policy through consumer power, 
it failed to coalesce an organized movement to influence systemic re-
form. This study reveals that placing the burden of social and envi-
ronmental damage to human and environmental health on the shoul-
ders of consumers draws attention away from the crucial players in 
organizations and government who should be accountable for making 
agriculture sustainable and food safe and nutritious. This rigorous 
study shows how the viability of organic farming and its broader im-
plications for health and sustainability depend on policy change and 
not consumer appeal. The challenges to consumption, she argues, 
should be focused on a challenge to the frameworks that sustain over-
consumption (259).  
 This book should be of interest to Iowans because it challenges us 
to think about our food production systems in terms broader than just 
our daily bread. O’Sullivan argues that “the entire organic movement 
has remained oriented toward praising acts of individual salvation, 
not mobilizing for social revolution (194).” A broader moral vision is 
important, she argues, because organics may provide solutions to the 
rising costs of health care, global warming, and world hunger, but not 
without more integrated scientific studies, central organizational vision, 
and charismatic leadership. Much more is needed than just individual 
ethical decision making.  
 
 
Iowa’s Record Setting Governor: The Terry Branstad Story, by Mike Chap-
man. Des Moines: Business Publications Corp., 2015. xxii, 234 pp. Illus-
trations, notes, appendixes, index. $14.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Timothy Walch is director emeritus of the Herbert Hoover Presiden-
tial Library and a volunteer at the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. 
You should never judge a book by its cover, but it is fair to judge this 
biography by its title: Iowa’s Record Setting Governor. That Terry Bran-
stad has served as governor of Iowa for a long time is a given. Several 


English

American Organic: A Cultural History of Farming, Gardening, Shopping, and Eating

Review of: "Corn Poll: A Novel of the Iowa Caucuses," by Zachary Michael Jack

Schaefer, Matthew

Book Reviews and Notices      283 
appendixes listing the governors of Iowa, the longest-serving governors 
in U.S. history, the Branstad family, and staff members of the Branstad 
administrations. The book also includes footnotes, a list of interview 
subjects, additional sources of information, and an index.  
 Chapman has written a readable biography that belongs in every 
library in Iowa. That having been said, it is only the first draft of the 
Branstad story. Yet to come, of course, will be more rigorous study 
of his leadership though challenging times. That future work will nec-
essarily be based on Branstad’s gubernatorial papers and records held 
by the State Historical Society of Iowa. Indeed, a future study also 
will include assessments by Branstad’s critics as well as his staff and 
supporters. 
 
 
Corn Poll: A Novel of the Iowa Caucuses, by Zachary Michael Jack. North 
Liberty, Iowa: Ice Cube Press, 2015. 496 pp. Discussion guide. $21.95 
paperback. 
Reviewer Matthew Schaefer is an archivist at the Herbert Hoover Presidential 
Library in West Branch. 
Iowans have grown used to the quadrennial invasion of politicians 
seeking their votes, or at least their caucus-night commitment, to jump 
start their presidential campaigns. Those who have lived in Iowa long 
enough might even grow tired of the fresh-faced volunteers canvassing 
neighborhoods, robo-calls from uncharted political vectors, and the 
relentless drone of television ads and news merging into tasteless po-
litical mush. For Iowans who have gone so far as to become jaded by 
the caucus process, Zachary Michael Jack’s Corn Poll: A Novel of the 
Iowa Caucuses would be a bracing tonic. 
 Corn Poll is a sweetly savage satire examining the all-too-familiar 
characters of the Iowa caucuses: cardboard cut-out politicians making 
feeble efforts to appear authentic in the retail politics of Iowa; worldly 
agents of the press corps deigning to spend a month in the Hawkeye 
state [in a state of high dudgeon], back-room politicos stage-managing 
events to make the “three out of Iowa” cut. Into this toxic mix, Jack 
introduces a hero, Jacob Preston, an Iowan ex-pat who recently lost his 
writing job at the Rocky Mountain Partisan. Preston wins the “Politics 
up Close” contest cosponsored by the Iowa GOP and the Republican 
National Committee. The political hacks hope to trade on Preston’s 
access to further their own agendas for the 2012 election. 
 At loose ends, Preston packs up his Honda and motors east to 
Hereford, Iowa—home of the Fighting Plowmen, the Calvin Coolidge 
Café, and Herb Clarke, curmudgeonly editor of the local newspaper. 
284      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
Hereford, it turns out, has become the de facto political center of Iowa 
(and the known universe) when candidate Milt Cloward moves his 
Iowa headquarters there. After Cloward’s poll numbers rise 10 per-
centage points, other candidates join the exodus from Des Moines. 
Soon Paul Paule, Rochelle Boxman, Rick Santoro, and other GOP hope-
fuls move their headquarters to the authenticity of small-town Iowa. 
As you can see, Jack enjoys wordplay just enough to move out of the 
libel zone. 
 Put on the spot during his first press conference, Preston poses an 
awkward question: “If there were a trophy given to the Iowa Caucus 
winner, what should it be?” The flummoxed politicians flail about, 
struggling with a question they could not have anticipated, before 
eventually agreeing on the Silver Steer as the appropriate prize. Func-
tioning as Greek chorus, Herb Clarke calls this an apt trophy because 
“the political process is a farce, a circus sold to the highest bidder 
while being pitched to the public as an exercise in participatory de-
mocracy.” 
 Artifice though it may be, the Silver Steer becomes a political 
player during the 40 days and 40 nights of political machinations and 
hypocrisy that lead to caucus night. Voters see in the Silver Steer a 
way to express their frustration with a political system that seems 
rigged. As caucus night nears and the Silver Steer rises in the polls, 
cow-napping, covert political operatives, and assorted dirty tricks liven 
up small-town Iowa. Everyman Jacob Preston finds himself celebrated 
as the wise fool on the national talk shows; the nation turns its jaun-
diced eye to Iowa to see if an inanimate object can win one of the three 
tickets out of Iowa. 
 I won’t spoil the story by revealing the ending, but know that I 
found Corn Poll to be an enjoyable romp. It is a pleasant diversion 
from the twisted political corn roast that is Iowa in January of election 
years. Clearly Zachary Michael Jack had fun with this take on the 2012 
Republican caucus—drawing on candidates who are largely self-
parodying and cooking up a plot line that keeps readers laughing. 
Including heroes grounded in the Iowa soil offers hope that the politi-
cal process can be improved. If Jack had this much fun making hash of 
the 2012 Republicans, I wonder what he would do with the 2016 can-
didate pool.  
 
 
 


Corn Poll: A Novel of the Iowa Caucuses

Review of: "Skunk Hill: A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin," by Robert A. Birmingham

Zimmer, Eric Steven

Book Reviews and Notices      277 
abstract, wavy bands of varying colors, a depiction of the region’s 
geology: the sand itself. The upper segments regularly portray eagles 
and American flags, situating the artist and his subjects in the United 
States. Objects or locales are faithfully illustrated at the center of the 
bottles. Sucholeiki identifies a bottle depicting George Washington 
as Clemens’s masterpiece and devotes a chapter to its development. 
The book closes with Sucholeiki’s brief statement on Clemens as 
a “fully fledged professional artist” in contrast to his followers and 
other folk artists. Such distinctions may not be of great interest to most 
readers; what the book does well is document the possibility for creative, 
widely applauded creative expression in rural Iowa in the late nine-
teenth century.  
 
 
Skunk Hill: A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin, by Robert A. 
Birmingham. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015. xii, 
116 pp. Maps, illustrations, census chart, allotment chart, notes, bibli-
ography, index. $14.95 paperback.  
Reviewer Eric Steven Zimmer is a research fellow at the Center for American 
Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS) on the Pine Ridge Indian Res-
ervation. He is the author of “Settlement Sovereignty: The Meskwaki Fight for 
Self-Governance, 1856–1937” (Annals of Iowa, 2014). 
In this fascinating and accessible contribution to midwestern history, 
archaeologist Robert A. Birmingham details the founding and decline 
of the village at Skunk Hill, a large community of Potawatomi people 
founded on the bluffs of central Wisconsin in 1905. The Skunk Hill 
community, he argues, “was the most prominent of several ceremonial 
communities in Wisconsin based around a cultural and spiritual re-
vival movement known as the Dream Dance,” often called the “Drum 
Dance,” which “swept across the Midwest and eastern Great Plains in 
the late nineteenth century” (2). The U.S. government had forced these 
Potawatomies onto a reservation in Kansas decades earlier. They fled 
that place before securing dozens of land allotments around Skunk 
Hill on which they assembled a cohesive community of about 20 fami-
lies. The Skunk Hill Potawatomies lived, worked, and worshiped on 
that land base for more than 20 years. They shared a communal ceme-
tery and a space for harvesting maple sap, as well as areas for cere-
monies and dances. Skunk Hill disbanded in the early 1930s after its 
founders, many of whom were spiritual leaders, died and most com-
munity members sold their land. 
 Birmingham deftly deploys archaeological and archival evidence 
to piece together the story of Skunk Hill. He also cultivated relation-
278      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
ships with many Skunk Hill descendants, whose oral histories molded 
Birmingham’s reverent account of their people. At times, his book 
seems unshaped by some recent developments in the field of Native 
American history. This is reflected in the thin bibliography. But engag-
ing in nuanced debates with specialists is not Birmingham’s goal; nor 
is he writing exclusively for a scholarly audience. Quite the opposite—
Skunk Hill aims squarely at general readers, and its purpose is to wrap 
that place in a broader historical context. Throughout, Birmingham 
ably weaves the processes of removal and cultural and spiritual as-
saults that indigenous peoples endured in the late nineteenth and early 
twentieth centuries into his discussion of Skunk Hill. Accordingly, this 
book will give novice readers a good sense of the overarching trajectory 
of Indian policy—not to mention a stellar example of an indigenous 
survival strategy—during this period.  
 Driven by a good story and filled with maps, photographs, and 
two excellent charts of the Skunk Hill census and the many allotments 
that shaped this community, Skunk Hill is a fun, respectful, and rele-
vant contribution to the history of Native peoples in Wisconsin and 
the Midwest. It will undoubtedly be cited by specialists, prized by 
Skunk Hill descendants, and enjoyed by regional history enthusiasts. 
 On a final note, Skunk Hill has opened a few leads that Iowa histo-
rians could pursue fruitfully. According to the Iowa General Assem-
bly’s legislative record from 1858, a cohort of Potawatomies secured 
permission that March to reside in Iowa. Unlike the Meskwaki Nation 
—which received a similar authorization in 1856 and still resides on its 
settlement near Tama—the Potawatomies do not seem to have stuck 
around the Hawkeye state. Who were these Iowa Potawatomies, and 
did they have any connection with those who founded Skunk Hill four 
decades later? Additionally, a religious movement called “the Drum 
Society” was active on the Meskwaki settlement in the middle of the 
twentieth century and was discussed at some length by the “Fox Proj-
ect” anthropologists who spent time there in the 1940s and 1950s. Was 
this another sect of the Skunk Hill Drum Dance? If so, did it make its 
way to Iowa from Wisconsin, or vice versa? 
 Skunk Hill offers a great deal to historians of the Midwest. Perhaps 
best of all, however, between its cracks an essay on Iowa’s Potawatomi 
history lies in wait.  
 
 
A Rainbow Division Lieutenant in France: The World War I Diary of John H. 
Taber, edited by Stephen H. Taber. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 
2015. viii, 312 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 paperback. 


Skunk Hill: A Native Ceremonial Community in Wisconsin

Review of: "Carnival in the Countryside: The History of the Iowa State Fair," by Chris Rasmussen

Morain, Tom

Book Reviews and Notices      81 
evidence that has been neglected or perhaps not even recognized. Dis-
covering whether they do could productively amplify the “viewer’s 
history” Finnegan has begun. 
 
 
Carnival in the Countryside: The History of the Iowa State Fair, by Chris 
Rasmussen. Iowa and the Midwest Experience Series. Iowa City: 
University of Iowa Press, 2015. vii, 206 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. 
$27.50 paperback. 
Reviewer Tom Morain is director of government relations at Graceland Uni-
versity and former administrator of the State Historical Society of Iowa. He 
has taught Iowa history at several institutions and online and has been active 
in public history projects around the state.  
Good histories spark curiosity on questions that their audiences may 
never have considered. On that scale, Chris Rasmussen plows new 
ground in his Carnival in the Countryside: The History of the Iowa State 
Fair. It is a good guess that among the record 1,117,398 visitors who 
passed through the gates at the 2015 fair, very few have ever given even 
passing consideration to the enormous complexities its production 
entails and fewer still to the philosophy behind its rise to become such 
an iconic tradition. Rasmussen, an American cultural and intellectual 
historian, is an Iowa native who earned a B.A. at Grinnell College and 
a Ph.D. at Rutgers. His passion for the fair is genetic. His father raced 
stock cars at the Iowa State Fair, he writes in his acknowledgments, 
and his mother “went for the country music.”  
 The book takes a chronological approach. The fair’s earliest advo-
cates were local agricultural societies whose mission was to promote 
better farming by displaying the results of superior methods: bigger 
ears of corn, fatter hogs, bigger and faster horses. Through the rest of 
the year, the societies promoted “book farming” through lectures and 
papers, but the fair was where they put their products into competi-
tion to prove their superiority. 
 But their high-minded motives for agricultural exhibitions had to 
contend with the stubborn reality that the public wanted something 
else, or at least something more. Fair visitors wanted entertainment. A 
day spent looking at longer carrots or the latest cream separators just 
didn’t do it, especially for mom and the kids. Rasmussen documents 
the continuing struggle between those who promoted the fair as an 
educational experience and those who looked to entertainments to 
increase gate receipts that would pay the bills. Vendors and performers 
of every variety also coveted the dollars that fairgoers brought with 
them. At one time, vendors, tent shows, and games of chance were 
82      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
kept outside the fence, but gradually, fair organizers allowed those 
they deemed wholesome and worthy inside, “midway” between the 
undesirable elements and the educational exhibits. Policing the “mid-
way” added one more responsibility to the fair board’s task. Fair offi-
cials found themselves challenged to protect the public from rigged 
games of chance and salacious sideshows while at the same time invit-
ing those that could draw the crowds to provide the necessary revenue. 
 Rasmussen does a good job of explaining how the fair reflected 
the concerns of rural Iowa and the larger context of Iowa and mid-
western culture. Economic hard times almost forced the state fair to 
close at times. Fair organizers wanted the fair to be a platform to pro-
claim the virtues of rural life. Anxieties in the early twentieth century 
occasioned by the growing perception of the disparities between the 
farm and the city were reflected in attention to the roles of farm women 
and youth. Art displays and healthy baby contests further broadened 
the scope of the agenda. The creation of the state extension service and 
its 4-H provided a strong source of educational programming and a 
reliable audience for the state fair that continues today. Unfortunately, 
the book stops its in-depth coverage of fair issues with the 1940s and 
provides only a few general comments in its final chapter about the 
entire last half-century. 
 The advent of movies and radio in the 1920s and ‘30s required fair 
organizers to get creative in its grandstand entertainments. Rasmussen 
brings to life the fascinating story of elaborately staged historical spec-
tacles (using the term historical loosely) like the Trojan War or Cortez’s 
conquest of the Aztecs. For example, Rasmussen records that, in 1916, 
“The Last Days of Pompeii” treated its grandstand audience to “gladi-
atorial combats, races, games, Egyptian dancers and other forms of 
merrymaking” before, as midwestern values required, Vesuvius erupted 
as divine retribution on such moral depravity (125). In 1932 grand-
stand visitors witnessed an Iowa State Fair classic: a staged collision 
between two speeding locomotives, the Roosevelt racing in from the left 
and the Hoover charging from the right. (The State Historical Society of 
Iowa has a video of the event.)  
 Rasmussen devotes a chapter to how the arts have been incorpo-
rated into the fair and how, in turn, the fair has been depicted in litera-
ture, painting, and movies. When painters were invited to enter their 
works for ribbons and prizes, the fair judges became cultural arbiters 
of what the standards of “Iowa” works should be. In the 1930s this 
pitted regionalists like Grant Wood, famous for depicting Iowa themes, 
against modernists who felt bound by no such restrictions, an argument 
that was playing out in larger art circles. The selection of judges be-
Book Reviews and Notices      83 
came a critical issue, and the fair finally allowed the artists themselves 
to vote on who would critique their work.  
 In 1932 Phil Stong’s novel State Fair became a bestseller. It traced 
the experiences of the Frake family—father, mother, son, and daughter 
—as they spent a week at the Iowa State Fair. Ignoring the rural des-
peration of the Great Depression, the novel painted a bucolic vision of 
farm life even as the two grown children entered into romantic liaisons 
on the fairgrounds and in downtown Des Moines. The movie, starring 
Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor as parents, became a box office hit that, 
according to Rasmussen, “rescued Fox studio from bankruptcy.” 
Rasmussen omits mention of the 1962 State Fair remake starring Pat 
Boone and Ann-Margaret that moved the whole episode to Texas. 
 A viewpoint of the fair visitors themselves is one the book often 
fails to explore. The minutes of fair board meetings are available; first-
hand accounts of the exhibits, food stands, or entertainments are not. 
What would the visitor to the 1880 fair see? What was behind the tent 
flaps the barkers were so vigorously extolling? Some of the most en-
gaging sections of Carnival are its descriptions of the grandstand shows 
and 4-H demonstrations. For those, Rasmussen gives us front-row seats. 
Nevertheless, anyone who reads Carnival in the Countryside will never 
walk down the main concourse with the Varied Industries Building to 
the right and the raucous midway to the left and not begin to wonder 
again how it all came to be. Ours is indeed a great state fair. Don’t 
miss it; don’t even be late. 
American Capitals: A Historical Geography, by Christian Montès. University 
of Chicago Geography Research Paper Number 247. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2014. 394 pp. Map, tables, charts, illustrations, 
appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Timothy R. Mahoney is professor of history at the University of 
Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience 
in the Antebellum Middle West (1999); River Towns in the Great West: The Struc-
ture of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820–1870 (1990); and 
the forthcoming From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era: Middle Class 
Life in Midwest America. 
In this intriguing and demanding book, Christian Montès relentlessly 
employs social-scientific analysis and model building to try to under-
stand the character of American state capitals. Among Americans cities, 
state capitals are some of the most familiar and well known but hard 
to define and understand. The book begins with an informed com-
mentary on the usual explanations. The author questions the tradi-
tional explanation that the location and scale of state capitals reflect 


Carnival in the Countryside: The History of the Iowa State Fair

Review of: "Duffy’s Iowa Caucus Cartoons: Watch ‘Em Run," by Brian Duff

Duffy's Iowa Caucus Cartoons: Watch 'Em Run

Review of: "How Iowa Conquered the World: The Story of a Small Farm State’s Journey to Global Dominance," by Michael Ran

Jack, Zachary

Book Reviews and Notices      449 
 Readers will find much to admire in this work. Gillis provides im-
pressively reasoned technical descriptions and wisely chosen visuals. 
He also offers rich discussions of a host of people who shaped the com-
pany’s history through rapid technological change, war, and economic 
stress. By the 1890s, Aeromotor was exporting windmills to Argentina, 
England, and even as far afield as Australia. By the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, however, the company was selling windmills that had been as-
sembled in Argentina and exited domestic manufacturing of the device 
for a time (146). 
 A particularly important theme woven throughout the work in-
volves how “self-governing water-pumping windmill” manufacturers 
faced competition from other water extraction methods (16). Aeromotor 
responded to such threats by entering many diverse and related fields 
such as gasoline-pumping engines and electric pumps (77, 138). Never-
theless, by the 1940s, the large-scale dissemination of electrical power 
into the countryside had become particularly disruptive for the wind-
mill industry. Thus, Aeromotor intensified its efforts to become more 
than a “windmill company and to embrace the sales opportunities of 
electric water pumps” (132). Today, rural residents enjoy even more 
water extraction options with the advent of “solar-powered water 
pumps” for remote water-pumping needs (190). Nevertheless, the com-
pany endures, as evidenced by its present 40,000-square-foot manufac-
turing facility in San Angelo, Texas (186). Gillis has honored the rich 
legacy of the Aeromotor Company by telling the story of a company 
whose name graces windmills scattered across the nation and world. 
 
 
How Iowa Conquered the World: The Story of a Small Farm State’s Journey to 
Global Dominance, by Michael Rank. Kansas City: Five Minute Books, 
2014. xi, 163 pp. Bibliography. $9.99 paperback; $2.99 e-book. 
Reviewer Zachary Michael Jack is a seventh-generation Iowan, associate pro-
fessor of English at North Central College, board member of the Midwestern 
History Association, and the author of Iowa: The Definitive Collection, among others. 
Michael Rank’s compelling book How Iowa Conquered the World reads 
more as public writing or journalism than it does as traditional, primary 
source-derived historiography, although it qualifies strictly as neither, 
and that’s okay.  
 The author—a native Iowan from Knoxville, a doctoral candidate in 
Middle Eastern history, and a former journalist—leads with his thesis: 
“The goal of this book is to make an extremely difficult argument. I will 
attempt to convince you why Iowa is the greatest cultural force in the 
world. Not in the Midwest or the United States, but in the world” (3). 
450      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The straightforwardness, boldness, repetitiveness, and syntactically frag-
mented nature of that claim underlines the ethos behind Rank’s project. 
Some historians would object to the whiff of sectionalism or chauvinism 
(or even jingoism) implicit in such an argument, as well as to its bom-
bastic tendency, but I find the author’s unapologetic pride in his home 
state refreshing. Rather than couch or obscure, Rank identifies his in-
nate boosterism (bias?) and owns it, then moves on with his project.  
 In many ways the premise for How Iowa Conquered the World is de-
rivative of a title published more than 20 years ago: Thomas Cahill’s 
How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995). Like Cahill, Rank intends a popu-
lar rather than exclusively scholarly audience for his treatment of his 
home state’s preeminence, and, like Cahill, he may succeed in offering 
an accessible synopsis or digest of one place’s heroically, historically 
understated influence. Rank himself waits until page 125, in the book’s 
closing chapter, to trace his inspiration, identifying Roifield Brown’s 
“How Jamaica Conquered the World” podcast as analog and precedent 
for his own promotional act. “Much like myself,” Rank explains, “he 
wants to sing those songs and make them known.” The “Caribbean 
island known for reggae, dreadlocks, steel drums, and Olympic sprint-
ers,” he notes, “is another place that has the same number of residents 
and also has a mighty reach despite its small size “(125).  
 In offering an inventory of Jamaica’s better-known cultural calling 
cards, Rank foregrounds his own coverage-via-inventory. The author in-
tends to offer an hors d’oeuvres of Iowa’s cultural legacy here, not a main 
course. At approximately 135 pages, minus bibliography and excessive 
back matter, the book is slight measured against conventional mono-
graphs. Indeed, the back jacket and introduction reiterate the sampler/ 
survey methodology deployed therein, promising in bullet points to 
cover everything from how Iowa and Iowans “saved billions of people 
from starvation” to how it “created Silicon Valley in the 1960s.” (The 
primary basis for the latter claim is that Robert Noyce, the Burlington, 
Iowa–born cofounder of the Intel Corporation, became a sort of honor-
ary “mayor of Silicon Valley” [24].) Some historians will object to such 
sweeping claims, because Rank’s argument rests, in fact, on case study. 
In fact, the author could better identify and signpost his methodologies 
throughout, as well as cite his sources (there is a bibliography but no 
endnotes and a paucity of in-text journalistic attributions). 
 Rank’s online publisher, as it appears on Amazon.com, is the Am-
azon self-publishing platform CreateSpace. His book seems geared to-
ward galvanizing Amazon readers in particular, as evidenced both by 
its affordability (free for Kindle subscribers), and by the author’s unu-
sually direct appeal in the back matter page titled “One Last Thing,” 
Book Reviews and Notices      451 
where readers are reminded go to the book’s Amazon page “to leave a 
review please. Thank you again for your support!” (163). The back mat-
ter of the print-on-demand title also includes an excerpt from Rank’s 
work in progress and a page for “Other Books by Michael Rank,” which 
lists such titles as History’s Most Insane Rulers and Greek Gods and God-
desses Gone Wild. 
 Rank’s approach is educational, entrepreneurial, and commercial. 
He brings a journalist’s bent to bear, although he apparently conducted 
few if any original interviews. The metaphors with which he chooses to 
illustrate his thesis—comparing Iowa’s underdog status to former Iowa 
State running back Troy Davis as the introduction’s overriding metaphor 
—are curious, and yet they emphasize a whimsicality often eschewed in 
more hidebound historical scholarship. In the end, Rank appears both 
eager for, and solicitous of, readers; his ethos is earnest. Readers of the 
Annals of Iowa may wish to give How Iowa Conquered the World a try. 
 
 
Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota before the Oil Boom, by Richard 
Edwards. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2015. xvi, 198 pp. 
Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $16.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Paula M. Nelson is professor of history emeritus at the University of 
Wisconsin–Platteville. She is the author of After the West Was Won: Homesteaders 
and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900–1917 (1986) and The Prairie Win-
nows Out Its Own: The West River Country of South Dakota in the Years of Depression 
and Dust (1996). 
We do not talk much about virtues these days. The word seems old-
fashioned, descriptive of the old sexual morality, maybe, but not one for 
our modern world, so full of transgressive beliefs and behaviors. Along 
comes Richard Edwards, director of the Center for Great Plains Studies 
at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, to remind us how just how much 
virtues matter. He is self-conscious about it, informing readers as he 
concludes his memoir that he does not see the inculcation and practice 
of virtues as conservative. That label reminds him of all of the evils of 
the modern-day political right, which he jabs vigorously in a few dis-
cordant lines near the end of his fine book. The lesson most readers will 
learn here is that teaching and practicing virtues is an excellent way to 
support a functional society. The people whose stories Edwards tells 
are an object lesson in their value.  
 Richard Edwards’s grandparents homesteaded in Mountrail County, 
North Dakota, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. His par-
ents moved into Stanley, the county seat, where he was born and lived 
until age 12, when the family moved to Massachusetts. Although he left 


How Iowa Conquered the World: The Story of a Small Farm State’s Journey to Global Dominance

Review of: "Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River," by Bonnie Stepenof

Nunnally, Patrick

Book Reviews and Notices      433 
sources into a comprehensive account of some of the dangers that faced 
the newly formed United States at that time, an account that casts new 
light on the life of one of America’s most famous figures between late 
1797 and 1803. The voyage down the Mississippi helped shape the river 
experiences and skills that Clark put to such good use on what he 
would call his “western travels”—the Lewis and Clark Expedition. 
 
 
Brown Water: A Narrative of My Personal Journey in the Wake of Lewis and 
Clark, by Butch Bouvier. Onawa, Iowa: Butch Bouvier (keelboat@long-
lines.com), 2015. xv, 186 pp. Illustrations, glossary. $20.00 paperback. 
Reviewer Norman Fry is a retired Southeastern Community College American 
history instructor with a longstanding interest in life in Iowa’s small towns and 
along the Mississippi River. 
Brown Water is Butch Bouvier’s personal narrative of his boat journey 
along the route taken by Lewis and Clark on the Missouri River. Bouvier 
describes himself as a “hands on” historian with a passion for living 
history, and his goal is not only to take the journey but to recreate the 
boats used by early river explorers. The narrative of Brown Water is com-
posed of three parts. The first is Bouvier’s own narrative describing the 
boat building and the journey. The second narrative, written in journals 
given to the crew by the author, offers the volunteer crew’s perspective 
on the river journey. The third narrative includes “Knowledge Nooks,” 
short explanatory inserts that illustrate the history and techniques of 
boat building. 
 Rather than a standard history, Brown Water is a modern boat-
wright’s account of the building of traditional riverboats. Bouvier gives 
abundant details on the selection of wood for boat construction, the con-
struction process, and the navigation by shallow draft keelboats and pi-
rogues. Readers interested in riverboat architecture will find Bouvier’s 
book an informative read. Readers fascinated by a personal adventure 
story, one that relates that adventure to the history of early Iowa and the 
perils of navigating the Missouri River, will find Brown Water a racon-
teur’s delight. 
 
 
Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River, by Bonnie 
Stepenoff. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. xxii, 182 pp. 
Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $36.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Patrick Nunnally is editor of Open Rivers: Rethinking the Mississippi, a 
digital journal published by the University of Minnesota.  
434      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
The middle Mississippi—that stretch between St. Louis and Memphis 
—is Mark Twain’s river. The stretch lacks the Delta’s romance or the 
approachable sense of the river farther north. The middle Mississippi is 
where the river really becomes “America’s River,” carrying massive 
amounts of freight as well as the freighted meanings that have made 
the river such an iconic part of American life. Bonnie Stepenoff’s book 
is a very approachable way to begin to understand the place. 
 Stepenoff’s focus is on the myriad people who work on and closely 
alongside the river. She introduces readers to boat captains and cooks, 
pilots, gamblers, and roustabouts, all of the upstanding as well as shady 
characters who have made the river their home. For the most part, these 
are voices not often heard; their inclusion, whether from oral history 
accounts or from other documents, is one of the book’s strengths. 
 A challenge for those who write about the river is how to organize 
their material—whether to employ chronology or geography as their 
central structure. Stepenoff alternates chapters on particular cities and 
towns, working from north to south, with chapters on classes of river 
workers. A chapter on Cairo, Illinois, is followed by her discussion of 
engineers, which is followed in turn by a focus on New Madrid, Mis-
souri. This approach is generally satisfactory but does at times mean a 
loss of thematic continuity. Stepenoff’s vivid, accessible prose makes 
her ideas and points readily understandable, though. 
 Working the Mississippi is not analytical in the way much conven-
tional scholarship is. For example, she closes her chapter on the troubled 
city of Cairo, Illinois, by stating that no single cause led to the city’s 
troubles, “but some of its woes came straight from the river” (88). Per-
haps she feels it would be speculative to explore how troubles “straight 
from the river” influence, or are influenced by, troubles that originate 
on land, but some further discussion is probably warranted. The idea is 
too intriguing just to drop. 
 There is an almost playful sense to Stepenoff’s approach that con-
trasts well with deeper analytical tomes. One of many little-known tid-
bits in the book is that Chester, Illinois, an otherwise forgettable small 
town, was the home of Elzie Crisler Segar, creator of the comic book 
character Popeye, the Sailor Man. Townspeople have long speculated 
who the local counterparts were for such nationally recognized figures 
as Wimpy, Bluto, and Olive Oyl. It turns out the Mississippi River and 
the communities on its banks have a greater resonance in the national 
imagination than even the most knowledgeable river rat might have 
guessed. 
 Throughout Working the Mississippi Stepenoff illustrates, but does 
not explicitly make an argument about, the myriad ways the Mississippi 
Book Reviews and Notices      435 
River’s story illuminates so many other stories central to the region’s 
and nation’s history. Many scholars of the Mississippi treat the river as 
important in and of itself, a sui generis geographical and historical phe-
nomenon that is important simply because of its size and centrality to 
the continent. Of course, that is true; it would be hard to imagine a his-
tory or geography of the region that did not take the Mississippi funda-
mentally into account. Stepenoff’s “smaller” stories, which originate 
from a particular place or a particular type of work, make very clear 
how much the river and its corridor of influence have to say to histori-
ans of such seemingly disparate subjects as race, class, labor, or gender. 
Her work provides material for scholars and others interested in how 
communities work, whether local influences trump national patterns, 
or how much influence individuals have on particular events, as op-
posed to the context of their place and time. 
 Ultimately, that is perhaps the greatest value of Stepenoff’s book: 
she invites readers to look more closely at subjects they may have a 
passing familiarity with, and, by doing so, to see connections to ideas 
and things that they had not thought of as associated with the Missis-
sippi River at all. Hers is not at all the “last word” on the Mississippi 
River, but rather the first word on a host of subjects that are touched by 
the river. 
 
 
Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum 
America, by Sharony Green. Early American Places. DeKalb: Northern 
Illinois University Press, 2015. xvii, 199 pp. Illustrations, chart, notes, 
bibliography, index. $24.95 paperback. 
Reviewer Darrel E. Bigham is emeritus professor of history and director of 
Historic Southern Indiana, University of Southern Indiana. He is the author of 
On Jordan’s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley (2005). 
The title of this brief work suggests the need to explore the little-known 
bonds of affection between slaves or freedpeople and their current or 
former white owners. The locus is Cincinnati, the midwestern border 
city with the largest number of African Americans in the antebellum 
period, where many unmarried mothers settled with their children born 
of unions with white masters. Many of these were “fancy,” attractive, 
fair-skinned women whose children were deemed, in the language of 
the day, “mulatto,” often able to “pass” as whites. 
 Green wants us to examine not only the well-known matrifocal 
trend in black families but also the role of white males in the equation. 
She asserts, “The historical record shows that there was often reciprocal 
regard, warmth, and even caring in settings where whites and blacks 


Working the Mississippi: Two Centuries of Life on the River

Review of: George Washington Carver: A Life, by Christina Vell

Chase, Hal S.

180      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
George Washington Carver: A Life, by Christina Vella. Southern Biography 
Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. ix, 456 pp. 
Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $38.00 hardcover. 
Reviewer Hal S. Chase is emeritus professor of history at DMACC–Urban 
Campus. His most notable contribution is his collaboration with 37 others to 
produce the 600-page, 20-chapter, richly illustrated and documented Outside 
In: African-American History in Iowa, 1838–2000 (2001).  
George Washington Carver: A Life by Christina Vella is the first scholarly 
biography of Carver since Linda McMurray’s George Washington Carver: 
Scientist and Symbol in 1981. Both are indebted to Rackham Holt’s 
George Washington Carver: An American Biography (1943; rev. ed., 1963). 
Vella’s contribution is a narrative that strives to reveal the man inside 
the legendary, heroic, mystic, humble, non-materialistic, extraordinary 
scientist. Her quest for Carver’s inner self reveals more than a little that 
is new, and her abundant quoting from Carver’s letters provides insight 
into his thought. Vella’s story follows the same chronological path as 
Holt and McMurray pursued, and her cast of characters is largely the 
same, but her perspective is new and goes far below the surface.  
 The significant others in Carver’s life include Moses Carver, 
George’s owner and father figure; the Milhollands of Winterset, Iowa, 
who steered Carver to Simpson College; Etta Budd, his art instructor 
there who pushed him to pursue a more practical career in botany at 
Iowa State; and James Wilson, his major professor there (and later U.S. 
secretary of agriculture), who encouraged Carver to accept Booker T. 
Washington’s offer to teach at Tuskegee. Holt included Mrs. Warren 
Logan, the wife of Tuskegee’s chief financial officer, in her cast, but 
McMurray did not. Vella makes her a major figure, if not the leading 
lady, in Carver’s life. Neither Holt nor McMurray included Birdie John-
son Howard, but Vella says that her effusive letters to Carver “took a 
form he should have understood quite well—a covert and possibly 
unconscious sexual passion disguising itself as religious zeal, . . . the 
same character as his fervid attraction to [Jim] Hardwick” (254). 
Hardwick was a charismatic, athletic, young YMCA worker who did 
not appear in Holt’s biography and who played only a cameo role in 
McMurray’s. In Vella’s Life, however, Carver “fell in love—there is no 
other word for it—with one special man who became in his letters, My 
Very Own, Handsome, Marvelous, Spiritual, Boy” (211). These words 
certainly document Carver’s ardor, but his description of seeing Hard-
wick in the audience at the YMCA Conference in Blue Ridge, North 
Carolina, focuses on “the Christ in you, of course.” Vella interprets 
such rhetoric as “a raging devotional fever,” and Carver as writing 
“palpitating” letters to Hardwick with “twitching excitement.” Yet she 
Book Reviews and Notices      181 
concedes that “it is delicate and easily contorted, this question of 
whether Carver’s love for Hardwick was an erotic attachment” (213), 
and she notes subsequently, “Not a syllable in Carver’s letters suggests 
that the old professor put his hands anywhere but on Hardwick’s head” 
(218). 
 Vella stands on firm ground when she describes Carver as full of 
fun and someone who had a bad stammer (except while singing), a 
high-pitched feminine voice, the ability “to play any instrument some-
one handed him” (116), and a belief in dreams and in a mystical, pan-
theistic God, with which he influenced Henry A. Wallace. She also 
describes his research and his relationships with people, plants, and 
every living thing as popularized by Glen Clark’s 1935 pamphlet, 
“The Man Who Talks with the Flowers,” which sold 200,000 copies. 
 Vella’s chapters on Carver’s relationship with Booker T. Washing-
ton are also strong and reinforce Louis Harlan’s memorable capsula-
tion of “The Wizard of Tuskegee” as a masterful manipulator with “an 
elaborate private life in which he changed roles with the skill of a ma-
gician” to acquire and maintain control, for “power was his game.” 
Washington played his game with Carver, repeatedly breaking prom-
ises of a research laboratory and ultimately stripping Carver of three 
of his four responsibilities. Yet Vella characterizes Carver’s response to 
Washington’s death in 1915 as “the grief of a son who lost a demand-
ing father without ever having succeeded in satisfying him” (157). 
Adella Logan’s suicide several days before Washington’s memorial 
service suggests that Carver’s grief was for his dear friend and confi-
dante rather than for the bane of his existence at Tuskegee. 
 Vella’s claim in the epilogue that Carver was “an individual born 
with no advantages” (326) belies her repeated, quoted professions of 
Carver’s faith in God and God’s gifts. Moreover, she does not pene-
trate Carver’s heart or mind about the pervasive, insidious, omnipres-
ent, and corrosive force of white racism he experienced. Perhaps he 
was a saint who could only see God or Christ in his fellow humans as 
he did in Jim Hardwick. Perhaps he was a prophet who heard God 
speaking in the plants and flowers, especially his beloved amaryllis. 
Perhaps he was “nothing but a man,” a human being, with a full range 
of human feelings, the greatest of which was “love,” erotic and platonic.  
 
  


George Washington Carver: A Life

Review of: Lincoln and the Immigrant, by Jason H. Silverma

Bigelow, Bruce

Book Reviews and Notices      171 
 Reconstruction Republicans demonstrated their “environmental 
view of citizenship” in their treatment of southern freedpeople and 
western Indians. Both groups, Dean’s agrarians held, should learn to 
“farm the soil in soil-enhancing ways” and follow the agricultural 
path that would transform them into civilized Victorian Christians. 
This civilizing project stalled in the South because the “violent opposi-
tion” of southern whites blocked land redistribution and failed in the 
West because the Indians preferred “to maintain a hunting-and-
gathering lifestyle” rather than take up farming (136). In Dean’s view, 
Reconstruction ended not with the withdrawal of federal troops from 
the South in 1877 but with the 1887 Dawes Act, a kind of Indian home-
stead act that allotted reservation land into private ownership in order 
to coerce native peoples into habits of cultivation.  
 The strength of this book is that it brings together several subfields 
of history—environmental, agricultural, and the history of the Civil War 
and of native peoples—all understood through the lens of agrarian 
fundamentalism. While some specialists in each subfield may quibble 
with details, this approach generates fascinating insights and should 
spark new lines of inquiry. Dean’s sources are almost all national in 
scope; how would this analysis look at the local level? If republicanism 
led to nature parks on a grand scale, did it also contribute to the appre-
ciation of nature in cities and towns? How did the project of civilizing 
southern freedpeople and western natives play out in the sermons and 
newspapers of midwestern communities where those republican 
farmers already lived? To what extent did race play a role in defining 
the paired opposites of “barbarism” and “civilization?” Overall, An 
Agrarian Republic is a well-written, important book for specialists and 
general readers alike and should spark renewed interest in nineteenth-
century midwestern agrarian values and practices. 
 
 
Lincoln and the Immigrant, by Jason H. Silverman. Concise Lincoln 
Library. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 159 pp. 
Illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bruce Bigelow is professor of geography at Butler University. He 
is the author of “Who Voted for Lincoln in Indiana? The Voting Behavior of 
Ethno-Religious Groups in the Presidential Elections of 1860 and 1864” (Journal 
of the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences, 2005). 
Jason Silverman has provided a succinct overview of Abraham Lin-
coln’s views and relationships with immigrants from his years as a 
young adult in Springfield to his term as president. Historiographically, 
Silverman has not actually broken new ground so much as he has gath-
172      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
ered into one book threads of arguments that can be found in other 
books on Lincoln that focus on matters other than immigration. Eric 
Foner’s study of Lincoln and emancipation, for example, touches a bit 
on these issues, as do nearly all the major biographies, such as those by 
David Donald and Michael Burlingame. This is no criticism of Silver-
man, for he has done exactly what the editors of the Concise Lincoln 
Library series want from their authors: brief, accessible overviews of 
subjects related to Lincoln that give general readers solidly researched 
information on topics related to Lincoln. No other book focuses exclu-
sively on Lincoln and immigration. 
 Lincoln came to Springfield in 1837 and remained there until he was 
president-elect in 1861. In 1860 Springfield’s population was 50 percent 
foreign born, with Germans and Irish each constituting about 20 percent 
of the population, along with smaller communities of Swedes, Portu-
guese, and Jews. Lincoln was especially close to Germans in Spring-
field and the state of Illinois while serving in the state legislature and 
the U.S. House of Representatives as well as while running for senator 
and president. He took German-language lessons and bought a German-
language newspaper. He also had close personal and political links to 
Swedes, Portuguese, and Jews. The New York Herald, a national Demo-
cratic paper, claimed that “in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin 
[Lincoln’s] victory [in 1860] was due to the large accessions he received 
from the Germans” (84). 
 Lincoln’s relations with Irish Catholics were quite the opposite. 
They were staunch Democrats, and Lincoln feared that they voted 
fraudulently. However, unlike a number of other Republican former 
Whigs, he categorically rejected the nativist Know Nothings. The issue 
of nativism was a problem for Republicans, including those in all of 
the midwestern states because of the region’s significant minority 
population of foreign-born residents. 
 As president, Lincoln rewarded the immigrant communities who 
supported him, especially the Germans. Franz Sigel and Carl Schurz 
became “political generals,” and 12 other German leaders became dip-
lomats in foreign consulates. Lincoln even befriended the Irish arch-
bishop of New York, John Hughes, by appointing him emissary to the 
Vatican, France, and England so that they would not support the Con-
federacy. He also appointed the first Jewish chaplain of the U.S. Army 
and rescinded General U. S. Grant’s banning of Jewish merchants from 
access to the army because they were “war profiteers.” 
 Silverman concludes that Lincoln believed in equality of oppor-
tunity for all residents of the United States because of his devotion to 
the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s foundational text. 


Lincoln and the Immigrant

Review of: Moments of Impact: Injury, Racialized Memory, and Reconciliation in College Football, by Jaime Schult

Baker, S. Zebulon

188      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
pact of technological change, among others, are illuminated through 
the lens of cycling and cycling culture. Lively writing and thorough 
research in original sources make The Two-Wheeled World of George B. 
Thayer a worthwhile addition to the literatures of late nineteenth- and 
early twentieth-century sports and cultural history. 
 
 
Moments of Impact: Injury, Racialized Memory, and Reconciliation in College 
Football, by Jaime Schultz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 
xiii, 198 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 hardcover.  
Reviewer S Zebulon Baker is associate director of the University Honors Pro-
gram at Miami University in Ohio. He received the State Historical Society of 
Iowa’s Throne-Aldrich Award in 2014 for his article, “ ‘This affair is about 
something bigger than John Bright’: Iowans Confront the Jim Crow South, 1946–
1951,” published in the Annals of Iowa (Spring 2013).  
Jaime Schultz’s Moments of Impact is, at its center, a study of the pro-
cesses through which historical memory is generated and subsequently 
put to use. She focuses her critical gaze primarily on the latter—
particularly how the racialized violence visited upon three African 
American football players at Iowa universities in the first half of the 
twentieth century was later appropriated by those institutions to 
commemorate notions of progress beyond those outrages and to ab-
solve the present of its own sins. Warning her readers against “utopian 
visions that posit some post-racist, post-racial society,” Schultz scrapes 
away the patina of myth and legend that encrusts the historical mem-
ories of the three athletes in question—Jack Trice, Ozzie Simmons, and 
John Bright—to understand how and why Iowans have chosen to re-
member—and forget—them and their injuries, as well as what those 
choices reveal about the ways Iowans engage with their racial history 
(146).  
 Like many other athletes of color in the early twentieth century, 
Trice, Simmons, and Bright fell victim to injuries that revealed a delib-
erate attempt by their white opponents to target them, or treat them 
roughly, because of their race. On October 6, 1923, in a game at the 
University of Minnesota, Trice sustained a broken clavicle in the first 
half, and then was cleated in the abdomen in the second, causing severe 
internal bleeding. After an excruciating train ride back from Minneap-
olis to Ames, he was checked into the student infirmary at Iowa State, 
where he eventually died. Eleven years later, Minnesota was again the 
perpetrator of so-called “rough tactics,” this time against Simmons in 
their game at Iowa City, which so infuriated Hawkeye supporters that 
threats of retaliation against the Gopher team and its fans were made 
Book Reviews and Notices      189 
before Iowa and Minnesota squared off again the following season. To 
pacify “the simmering antagonism” caused by Simmons’s brutal treat-
ment, the governors of Iowa and Minnesota, Clyde Herring and Floyd 
B. Olson, made a good-humored wager before the game of a prize hog, 
the forebear to the Floyd of Rosedale trophy that is still awarded to the 
winner of this annual rivalry (89). Far from the distraction caused by 
the governors, a series of pictures taken by Des Moines Register photog-
raphers during Drake’s contest at Oklahoma A&M in 1951 focused 
worldwide attention on an attack that Bright, Drake’s star player, 
endured on its first drive. Repeated hits with hard, heavy blows to 
the face by A&M lineman Wilbanks Smith shattered Bright’s jaw and 
knocked him out of the game. Rather than connecting these assaults to 
the broader pattern of racial violence in football at the time, Schultz 
notes, “most journalists represented them as discrete phenomena, as 
exceptional occurrences” (2). 
 The dimensions of exceptionalism cling to this trio because “they 
are all associated with some form of material culture” (2). Trice and 
Bright are namesakes to the football stadiums at their respective insti-
tutions; Floyd of Rosedale originated in Simmons’s battering. The cen-
tral questions of Schultz’s study, by her account, “concern why, when, 
and how these memorials came about” (2). She explores the frustrating, 
decades-long fight at Iowa State to rename its stadium in Trice’s honor, 
which sprung not from a contemporaneous effort by his classmates to re-
member him, but from the forge of Black Power protests in the 1970s, 
which racialized the narrative of his legend. The eventual decision by 
Iowa State administrators to rename the stadium in 1997 was a concil-
iatory gesture that sought to make up for the insensitive naming of a 
hall for Carrie Chapman Catt, whose pioneering feminism was pep-
pered with xenophobia and racism. Drake’s rededication of its football 
field in 2006 was framed as a “formal closure” to Bright’s attack, com-
plete with an apology from Oklahoma State (née A&M) (131). These 
memorials, Schultz warns, are tricky endeavors that can lead to “un-
intended but nevertheless dangerous” outcomes (132). “My primary 
concern,” she argues, “is that symbolic acts, such as naming Jack Trice 
Stadium and Johnny Bright Field, become icons of racial progress. 
They simultaneously remind us of past racial injustice and stand as 
testaments to the end of an era” (144). 
 The most satisfying—and effective—chapter of the book is Schultz’s 
study of Floyd of Rosedale, which is destined to become mandatory 
reading for anyone interested in the black athlete experience in the Big 
Ten. Here, Schultz makes her most convincing case for how racialized 
memory determines the ways the past is remembered via a detailed 
190      THE ANNALS OF IOWA 
look at the contemporaneous processes by which it is also forgotten. 
“Rather than facilitating memories of Simmons,” she explains, “Floyd 
of Rosedale was designed to make people forget” (73). The welter of 
anger that resulted from how Simmons was treated in that 1934 game 
disappeared as Governors Herring and Olsen redirected the public’s 
attention from a serious confrontation with racial issues to a porcine 
absurdity. “Political intervention not only calmed interstate anxieties,” 
Schultz observes, “it also glossed over and de-racialized any contro-
versy concerning Simmons’s place on the gridiron” (89). This was a 
fate to which Simmons resigned himself once his playing days were 
done. “Football’s a racket,” he said. “I play it because I love it. I know 
I’ll be forgotten in two or three years” (98). Floyd of Rosedale is thus a 
talisman for how forgetting shapes remembering, indelibly fostering 
narratives that obscure as much as they crystallize popular historical 
memory. Schultz, in turn, challenges her readers to remember Sim-
mons, Trice, and Bright, rather than “allowing their legacies to drift 
into the ether of neglect” (146). Yet, in that act of remembrance, “the 
racialized memories of these three men and the injuries and insults 
they sustained while playing college football best serve contemporary 
society by reminding us that coming to terms with the past must also 
include efforts to engage with the present” (146).  
 
 
Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmental-
ism, by Mark R. Stoll. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xiii, 406 
pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 hardcover. 
Reviewer Bill R. Douglas is an independent historian—and Presbyterian—
based in Des Moines. His work focuses on Iowa’s religious history. 
Environmentalists were Presbyterians. That’s the short summary of this 
long, engaging, and partially persuasive book. The longer summary is 
that Congregationalists in the nineteenth century, with their ordered 
commons, and Presbyterians in the early twentieth century, with their 
call for stewardship of the vast lands left for federal management, 
formed and dominated the American environmental movement. To be 
precise, Stoll argues that environmental leaders of the first half of the 
twentieth century had grown up Presbyterian, though they were often 
lapsed. The book’s most important and provocative contribution is in 
recovering denominationalism as an essential category in American 
thought and practice. 
 This is a quirky book. The entire first part is a description of Ameri-
can nineteenth-century landscape artists. Patient readers may admire the 
full-color plates. Impatient readers may wonder about their relevance. 


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